Thursday, September 6, 2012

Welcome back to my five part playroom redesign series,
{little playspaces} BIG IDEAS! You’ve spent some time dreaming and planning the
perfect playspace to meet your child’s needs by Planning an IntentionalPlayspace and you’ve thought through your desires for the
Atmosphere of the playspace
, and you’ve thought through your vision for the Aesthetics of the space
… Today’s focus is on the workspaces in your new playspace.

Whether you have a large space to work with or a tiny nook,
you’ll need to select functional furniture. Ask yourself: what will facilitate
the work your child will do in the space?

I wanted to provide four areas of possible play in our itty
bitty study: reading, sensory play, art, and kitchen. My two big challenges in
making this part happen were space and budget…as in small space and an even
smaller budget! Here is what I did to pull this off…

Reading Nook

Here is the reading nook in my dream home
but in my tiny study in my real-life house, that just ain’t gonna happen!
Keeping that in the dream file, I looked at how I could work with what we had.
We have had this giant overstuffed armchair in our living room for over five
years. It takes up an obscene amount of space in a small living room, no one in
my family ever sat in it, and it looked like an elephant. I pulled this beast
into the study, set it at an angle, and saw the monster in a new light when my
kids immediately scrabbled into it…apparently moving the hulk into a new space
made it interesting to them…and I never even thought of it as a possible
reading nook. But guess what? It’s perfect! With a few comfy pillows, a basket
of books, and one of my patchwork quilts protecting the ottoman, it has become
a cozy little spot for the kids to snuggle up and read or play. It also makes a
great place for me to tuck in with my laptop to work while the kids play. And
it turns out that the ottoman, with a little chair pulled up, is the perfect
height to serve as additional play space. It’s no hanging wicker seat with a
round window behind it, but it works great and didn’t cost a dime! Perfect!

Sensory Table

My kids spend more time building scenes in rice with
pinecones and pipe cleaners than they do messing around with toys, so I knew I
wanted a sensory table in the new space. But my study is carpeted, and I
despise cleaning up spilled rice and dry bins on carpet. Until I talk the hubs
into pulling out all of our carpet in favor of wood floors, the rice and beans
really needs to stay in the kitchen. As a tidier alternative, I came up with
this idea that I wanted to build a curiosity table…I snagged an old wall
shadowbox display at Goodwill for about $4 and figured I’d attach some legs to
the bottom somehow so the kids could sit/stand at it and use the small spaces
to organize, sort, and play. The challenge? I can barely hang a picture, let
alone actually build anything- and we don’t have any workshop and woodworking
space here either. So I tracked down a friend who had just built some furniture
for his living room and commissioned him to attach some legs for me. Instead,
he blew me away with this creation- wow! (If you’re interested, check out his
other work here.) The children were equally amazed, and love to sort out whatever will fit in
the little spaces: rock collection, tiny horses, clip-on earrings, Hot Wheels,
sea shells, pom poms, play coins and dollars, figurines, you name it! The
Plexiglas lid lowers to protect the collections and doubles as an extra surface
to work on. Love it!

Art Table

Both of my little ones are big into arts and crafts, but
they come by it honestly! Ha! An art table was a must for their play area. I
would love to try making this DIY craft station from Martha Stewart someday,
but my study will only support something, oh, a fifth of that size! So I had to
ask myself, what do they really need? A table. A chair. That I can do! The
tallest of an old set of nesting tables turned out to be the perfect height for
the kids. One of the unused chairs from their dinner table pushes in very
nicely. For materials storage, I covered some old frosting cans with some cute
scrapbook paper and filled them with crayons, glue sticks, and safety scissors.
We picked up a “real artist’s” wooden art kit with an easel at a garage sale
for $3 (what a steal!). A stack of white drawing paper on top with my beautiful
red clog full of colored pencils on top of that…this has been my daughter’s
number one hang out since I set it up. First stop after waking up in the
morning, before she hits the breakfast table: we added a little basket behind
the chair for her to store her notebooks and works in progress, and she
couldn’t be happier.

Kitchen

This was a big, unexpected, added bonus for our playspace! I
was trolling garage sales, Goodwills, and secondhand shops for a teeny tiny
shelf for the playroom, when I saw the back of what looked like the
perfect-size bookshelf sticking out from behind an old couch. But when I turned
it around, it was a gorgeous little preschool-grade kitchen set…for $9! Score!
The finish was a little worn and totally the wrong color for my taste, and the
stove top was a little scratched, but for under $10 it is absolutely amazing! I
decided to get really crazy and try to refinish it myself…it actually turned
out pretty great, if I do say so myself! The kids helped sand it, so in their
minds, they “made” this new kitchen set themselves- which of course increases
the kid appeal a hundred fold.

So there you have it: I rearranged, thrifted, and
refurbished my way into creating all the workspaces we need for our new
playspace.

Your turn! Go back to your Dreaming and Planning Sheetsand your Atmosphere Sheet.What do you need to buy, beg for,
borrow, or build to create the workspaces you need for YOUR new playroom? Get
busy planning and searching, and we’ll meet back here to focus on setting up
and maintaining your new playroom!

Saturday, September 1, 2012

If you’re just joining in, we are in the midst of my five
part playroom redesign series, {little playspaces} BIG IDEAS! You’ve spent some
time dreaming and planning the perfect playspace to meet your child’s needs by
Planning an Intentional Playspace and you’ve thought through your desires for the
Atmosphere of the Playspace
… Today’s focus is on the aesthetics of the playspace.

Aesthetics refers to the visual appeal of the playroom from
an artistic standpoint. You may be envisioning your current playroom and snickering
under your breath: “Artistic?!? Doesn’t she mean chaotic? Ha!”

This is a great place to stop and reassure you that I am not
delusional or living in some sort of Stepford-child fantasy world of plastic-smiled
mothers and perpetually tidy robot children: let me give you some background on
mistakes we’ve made, lessons we’ve learned, what we believe, and how we came to
the idea of the intentional playspace in the first place…the aesthetics follow
that naturally!J

I’m not unrealistic or pretending my kids are something they
aren’t: my kids can be a hot mess, they make messes, and they make BIG, BIG
messes sometimes. I have wrestled my way through the transition of the
borderline OCD pre-mom days of lining up my canned goods from tallest to
smallest to the post-mom anarchy that ended many days with me shoving a bunch
of kid clutter into a basket and counting that an organizational victory. It
hasn’t been an easy road, it will always be a work in progress, and I still
miss my label maker sometimes…but I’ve come to grips with the messes that
accompany our children, and I’ve divided them into two categories to keep us
all sane: productive mess-making and unproductive mess-making.

Productive mess-making is not only tolerated in our house-
it’s celebrated! (More so by me than the hubs, but that’s a different story!)
What is “productive mess-making,” you ask? This is what happens when the kids
are engaged in developmental, creative, or artistic play activities that
inevitably result in a huge mess: think rice bins, finger paint, paper doll
construction, figure & clay scenes, shaving cream painting, salt dough,
birdseed ornament making (even I may never do that one again- eesh!), water tables, pom-pom wars, etc.

Unproductive mess-making is the kind of mess-making that I
have a hard time tolerating. This is the mess-making that happens when my kids
are bored and overstimulated by access to too much stuff: dragging out random
toys for no apparent reason but to make messes, dumping out a bin of toys to
wallow around in it and then walk away, getting out and mixing up multiple
puzzles and leaving them in a heap, walking away from a play area with
everything everywhere and nothing in its place…agggghhhhhhhh!

We started off the kid years with nice little bins and
organizers full of toys and books strategically placed all throughout the house…a
basket of books here, a three-drawer organizer of blocks and cars there…this
apparently blew their minds and made them into mess-making monsters. Everywhere
they turned there was a bin full of stuff to dump out…dumping out bins is fun,
fun, fun! Mommy following them around at the end of the day, refilling the bins
is not, not, NOT!

It turns out that old saying, “less is more”…well, it’s true
after all.

We put an end to the mayhem: over the course of about two
months, we went through the whole house and performed The Great Purge of 2012.
Every toy and kid item in our home was evaluated, organized, or abandoned:
broken things went in the trash, outgrown/unneeded items went in two garage
sales/ on Craig’s List/ to Goodwill, and the keepers were binned. The strategic
storage for every nook and cranny? Gone. Bins of 100+ Matchbox cars in the
living room? Bye bye. 25 Barbies in the study with only 14.5 outfits between
them? See ya! All the toys were moved back to the kids’ rooms, and are housed
in their active play bins, under their beds, or in the closet.

With the living areas of the home free from the kid stuff,
we asked ourselves: what do we want to see when the kids are home with us,
playing on their own or with us? What kind of play do we want to encourage? How
can we be intentional about encouraging creative play and play-based learning
in our home?

The intentional playspace was born.

Our goal was to redesign our little-used study into a
functional space in which the children could play and work alongside us. Since
our study is located just off the entryway from the front door in our
open-floor plan home, we knew that we wanted the playspace to look “nice:” we
wanted it to look like it was part of our home, and we wanted the area to be
visually appealing to kids and grown-ups. As a teacher, I think I tend to look
at my children’s home activities a little differently than some people. I don’t
mean that I want to bombard them with school-like activities every waking
minute of the day, but I do tend to focus on the educational value of where and
how they’re spending their time.

I’m a believer in the idea that parents are a child’s first
teacher in every sense of the word, and I am a firm believer in the certainty
that children learn through play…in fact, I feel that they learn much, much
more through creative-play-based activities and experiential learning than they
do sitting at a desk…but I digress… Montessori,
Waldorf, and Reggio principles drive my approach to living and learning with my
children, though we do balance this approach with a healthy sprinkling of more
mainstream kid-activities and, of course, that chipper yellow sponge that shall
remain unnamed…J

When it came to giving the children a space of their own, I
knew I wanted to create the feel and function of a Waldorf-inspired classroom
right here in our study. The two big concepts I focused on to enhance the
aesthetics of our space were artistic displays and a comfortable feeling of
home.

Artistic Displays

Displaying the children’s artwork in this space was a must
for me: I love the look of matting and framing young children’s art, like you
see here in this gorgeous display from Echoes of Laughter.Now as a mother, I love every little crayoned
and painted masterpiece that comes out of my two, but as an artist- and as a
human- I recognize the fact that some of the paintings they make just look like
scribbles and mistakes. (Shh- don’t tell the littles!) I went through their
artwork files and picked out three pieces that I loved, that had that
artsy-feel, and that matched pretty well with our paint scheme and general home
décor. I placed them in cream mattes within bold, black frames (just like the
rest of the art and photographs in our home). Two of them went up on the wall
above the desk, but I’m still working on convincing the hubs that the third-
the mixed media horse- needs to be up there too. I think it’s the one wandering
eye of the horst that’s bugging him…I’m working on him…J

I

n addition to the kids’ art, I also wanted to display some
grown-up art as well. I’m on the lookout for the perfect piece of subway art,
but I’m trying to be patient: there are so many out there to choose from, and I
don’t want to rush into anything pricey without making sure it speaks to what
we really believe…Imagination by naokosstoopis a beautiful art print at the top of
the list at the moment, as is this subway art from AlexanderCreative,
but I’m still deliberating…

Photographs are another must-have for the playspace. Last
Christmas I laminated five 8.5x11 collages with family photos from the previous
year. These travel around with the kids, and I wanted to give them a more
permanent home in the playspace. A couple mini-albums and small scrapbooks from
our adventures sit on the desk, and the baby books and family albums are on low
shelves within grabbing distance. Little Lady likes to flip through our wedding
album to get ideas for playing dress up, and Little Man loves to pull out his
Yo Gabba Gabba birthday album and point out all the characters of the show. I’ve
also taken to setting out a rotating display of small framed photos featuring
the kids in action: they love to rearrange the photos to retell stories of the
places we’ve been and the adventures we’ve had. I’m in the process of matting
and framing some recent professional photos of the kiddos too, but the frames
are a little spendy so I’m pacing myself on those…

Comfortable Feeling of Home

One obstacle to creating a playspace in what is effectively
the entryway of our home has been how to make it kid-friendly without
sacrificing the continuity of our home décor scheme. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m
no decorating snob. But have you noticed that much of the affordable kid and
playroom furniture is either painted in primary colors, made of plastic, or
splashed with cartoon characters? This is my own preference, of course, but I
wince at the thought of that being the first thing you’d see when you enter my
home. On the other hand, there’s just no way that I would spend the hundreds of
dollars it would take to give the space that natural, distressed, contemporary
feel I love from Pottery Barn Kids…or from Target, for that matter! I had an
image in my mind, some sort of cross between a Waldorf classroom (check out
these amazing learning environments from Let the Children Play) and an extension of my living room…books, low shelves, nature, manipulatives,
small chairs and tables, a grown-up chair to suggle up in with a good book…neutral
tones, black accents, dark wood grain, baskets… It took some creativity,
thrifting, and patience to pull together the furniture we wanted, (more on thrifted
furniture and refinished pieces to come tomorrow in Workspace) but it’s coming
together, and it looks like it belongs with the rest of our home.

I’ve taken you through my thought-processes in trying to
bring beauty and continuity into our playspace…now it’s your turn! Look over
your Dreaming and Planning Sheetsand your Atmosphere Sheet. What do you want to see when you look at your new playroom?
What color scheme will you use? What will be on the walls? What’s “the look” and
“the feel” you’re going for…and what does that tell you about yourself and your
children? I’ll see you back here tomorrow to talk about the Workspaces you’ll focus
on in your new playroom!